Entropy

If you walk just far enough off the track,
through the mallee scrub, the sugarwood,
through all of the
severe branches, over the driest
of earths, crunching stone and scat
under foot, you will find
the bones
resting
under the smoldering eye of the sun.
Not small bones,
not fresh.

I sit close enough to see the white
adorning the ground like jewelry, and wonder
how and why and
when the bones first fell.

Instinct tells me not to go
where the big predators go,
but here, in the southern desert heat,
it is the cat, the
fox, the wedge-tail eagle, and man
that draws the most blood.

When so many years have passed and
we are gone, not
only from this land but from this life,
and the feathers fall like cotton, blown
in the wind, and
the flesh of everything roots in the belly of
another,
will only the bones remain of some wiser and
more simple
existence?

In my own skin, the bones ache.
For the earth—for a
resting place, for the bleached skin of the
sun to strip away everything and
expose me
from the inside out.

I wonder where they will end up,
here,
or in American soil,
burned in a forest fire in 2052,
ground to a fine powder or thrown,
with a heavy bag of weighted words,
from the peak
of a chaotic mountain
top.